Fact-Simile

There's a new issue of Fact-Simile out, which can be read for free in PDF form here. A pretty good interview with Brian Evenson, as well as a story by him, and of course lots more stuff from others.

Rachel B. Glaser - Pee on Water

Right now I'm broke (you have to teach at NMSU for a full month before they get around to paying you, even if you've been doing it for years) but if you can afford it I strongly recommend Rachel B. Glaser's Pee on Water, out from Publishing Genius. I've read several of the stories in the book (you can too!) and her work is just always really interesting, weird, beautiful, funny, sad, etc. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Here's an excerpt from the titular story:

Though alien to the world’s ancient past, young blood runs similar circles.  All those bones are born from four grandparents.  Baby teeth and baby teeth all down the line.  Jackets didn’t used to zip up.  There wasn’t a single door.  The ground sits around us dumb and keeping secrets. 
 
Earth is round and open, whole and beating in its early years.  Middle of the night, the stars in a bright smear against the blackboard.  Sit in the centuries-long lull.  A breath pulled so gradual the breath forgets.  Clouds idly shift their shapes.  Winds run back and forth.  Our planet in the slowest pink floyd intro.  Stubborn ice blocks will not be niced down by the fat sun.  Melted tears run, then freeze.  Tiny cells slide into tiny cells.  The wind learns to whistle. The sun starts setting in a colorful display.  Ice melts into oceans, lakes and ponds.  Plants have their first batch of leaves.  Guppies shiver in the lake.  Shiver, have babies, babies shiver.  Crawlers.  Diggers.  Stingers.  The plants get bit and chewed.  Leaves grow more intricate.  Beings start dragging with them, little lives.  Moments where they crawl on sand.  Moments where they look behind them.  They eat plants.  They eat stomachs.  Lick bones.  They pee on grass.  Pee on dirt.  Pee on snow.  Their skin is cut by teeth, by claws.  Water fills their lungs.  Blood falls out of place; cries itself in a blind pool.  Blood dries on leaves.  Blood browns on fur.  Creatures big as mountains stomp on top of mountains.  Then new ones.  New ones.  Feathers, spikes, hooves.  Clouds crawl smugly.  The air smells cool.  Atoms bump and lump without letters and numbers.  Monkeys play with sticks.  Monkeys eat ants.  Birds have sex.  Bears have sex.  The sun gets better at setting.  The monkeys walk upright, slouched, lips pursed, smiling, not smiling.  They get sexy about each other’s butts.  The monkeys fuck from behind.  They sleep in leaves, in mud, in trees.  They protect their babies and teach them.  The sun glares in their eyes, making spots.  Ants amble on, self-consciously changing direction.  Monkeys pee on leaves, on dirt.  Rain makes them flinch, makes them happy.  The monkeys make faces.  The monkeys get smart.  Two monkeys look at each other with knowing eyes.  The trees sway.  The birds chat.  The knowing eyes are locked in a gaze.  They look away.  They look back.  They have sophisticated children.  The monkeys grow and learn, get mad, throw stones.  New monkeys make faces and new sounds.  They need less and less protective hair.  They have babies.  Those new monkeys have babies.  They fight, throw punches, show teeth and bite.  The new monkeys think each other are sexy.  Raise their babies away from other monkeys.  New knowing eyes.  Laughing, teasing.  The new monkeys have vaginas more between their legs, less easy to snag on branches.  Males try sex with females from the front.  Boobs get bigger to remind males what butts felt like. 

"The Short Story"

This essay is alternately interesting, infuriating, hilarious, and idiotic. Fundamentally it's difficult to take a writer seriously who aims to survey the entirety of modern American fiction through the goddamn BASS anthology, but I dunno, what do you think?

The room I'm teaching in

It's something like fifteen minutes walking from the English department offices. You have to walk with a crowd of students across Espina street. The stop sign situation there can be frustrating for everyone, as half the world is trying to drive through the crosswalk and the other half -- the half with right of way -- is trying to walk across it. The walkers generally win, but the cars get fed up ("WE'RE CARS!") and drive all the way out into the middle of things to claim the space the second there's a gap, sometimes too fast.

My building is across the way from another building where, as best I can tell, they keep cows. (NMSU was an agricultural college first, after all.) You can smell them pretty clearly. Thankfully the smell doesn't follow you inside. The halls of the building look bad but the rooms themselves are fine, if a bit spacious for a CW class and entirely inappropriate in their arrangement. The students are arranged in spacious rows, facing front, and the instructor is afforded a ludicrously large empty space in which to stalk in front of the class like a puma, but not a desk. (I need to move one of the tables over to serve as a desk, or possibly make my entire class of 20ish students form a circle of chairs at the front of the room, so we can actually talk. Crowds scare me [really, they do] and if I'm standing up in front of a class I feel like I have to talk a lot and be funny, which sometimes works out well and sometimes seems a waste of everyone's time.)

The best part, though, is that this massive room -- my class fills maybe half of it with plenty of air to breathe and move -- is lined with the severed, mounted heads of various large animals, elk, eagles, fish, and so on. I'm not sure if they're real, but there are dozens, and they all stare -- many gape-mouthed -- in a sort of mute judgment on the center of the room, i.e., the students.

Actually in some ways I like the place a lot. I do wish I didn't have to get in so early to make the walk, though. I'll have to take pictures.

Brian Conn - "The Fixed Stars"

A Google search for "Brian Conn The Fixed Stars" doesn't take you far. There's an interview at 21C. There's a review by Benjamin Gottlieb. Another interview at Flatmancrooked. You would hardly know it's probably one of the best, most interesting, exciting novels published this year. FC2's endorsement means a lot to me, but I was still surprised by how strange and beautiful it was as reading. I've got a review coming in Puerto del Sol, and I don't want to cannibalize that too much, but here's the short version:

The Fixed Stars takes place after the end of the world. The causes are not clear, though you can feel them always pressing. Much of it takes place in a community at the brink, threatened by plague and scarcity. The people are alien, their culture is strange -- at times they seem admirable in their love, their selflessness, their generosity. At times they are opaque. Negotiating with them, imagining them, feels good. And there are many other stories -- romances, terrors, monsters, weird scientists, etc. The tone vacillates and slithers. It is rich, complex, at times difficult to read, at times compulsively readable. It is, like the magazine Conn co-edits, a brilliant example of the power that lies in taking science fiction seriously as a way of making art. You should buy it and read it.

I have to admit I've been puzzled by the apparent lack of buzz about this book. I've talked to people who loved it and I've read as much in scattered comment threads, etc. Brian Evenson has done his best to talk it up on his site and when I saw him at AWP, and in interviews, and presumably elsewhere. I don't know if it just hasn't found the right hands or what. Maybe it's selling like hotcakes and it just hasn't inspired a lot of coverage. I've got no idea. But one of the reasons I want Uncanny Valley to become something big is writers like Conn -- the ones that don't obviously fit a niche even in the weird little ecosystem of indie lit, but whose writing is so compelling that I believe they could be huge, if only they were given the chance. FC2 has given Conn the chance. So why hasn't the 'net wised up yet? What do I have to do to get you to read this book?

More Pedagogy

I have been a delinquent blogger due to finishing my novel-slash-thesis this week. I will work on planning some posts! But for now, here's a brief one.

I've been curious for a while as to why there's so little "official" material written about creative writing pedagogy and methods. AWP's pedagogy panel seems like one attempt to remedy this, but given that this is primarily student- rather than teacher-based and that so few papers are ultimately published, it seems like only a partial solution. It also seems like a lot of talking about teaching happens face-to-face, or in blog comment sections, and that a fair number of good thoughts just drop into the void.

I have come across one publication lately, Creative Writing: Teaching Theory and Practice, that looks to be addressing the lack. It's online, it looks to operate on about a yearly basis, and it is, I think, currently accepting submissions. What's really nice is that it looks like many of the contributors have taken it on themselves to be not only ambitious in their choice of topics, but really rigorous in their efforts to locate and build on previous scholarship. So, it's not exercise or class activity-based, which is what I want, and what I'd argue is the right direction for the discipline to be moving.

I haven't read anything there in full yet, but it seems like a good project to support. And it leads me to hope that my impression is wrong--that there is scholarly work being done on the subject and that I'm just looking in the wrong places, or not looking hard enough.

Does anyone know about other publications trying to fill the void? Publications that fill the void without necessarily trying to? Is there a void at all--is this just a misconception?

Tuesday Night Dance Party: Boat/Not Boat Edition

Tonight in Tuesday Night Dance Party, Tracy and I talk about first books and first boners.

(For those of you wondering what this is, think of it as a ghetto podcast built with YouTubes. Also think of it as Tracy's idea.)

On the pleasures of reading, pt. 2

Before we discuss the advantages of discussing writing in terms of pleasures, it might help to describe my lesson plan for the first day of intro to CW. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to bring my laptop and speakers to class. I'll have these set up when everybody comes in. Maybe, if I'm in the right mood and the timing is right, I'll have something playing. More likely I won't. We'll do the usual stuff -- read through the syllabus, distribute our first stories, solicit questions, explain my approach, get to know the students -- and then I'll use the laptop. I'll listen to music with them. I've got a playlist ready, though I've been messing with it a lot, swapping songs out, and most of it won't probably be heard.

I should note that students at NMSU do not typically like my music. In my intro comp course I've always had one day a week where the first thing students did was sit in silence and write whatever they wanted while I played music for them. They tend to complain, and also to assume that all the stuff I listen to is really old (because, I guess, one of my fetishes is stuff that sounds like it comes from the '60s/'70s [BUT NOT THE '80s]). I've learned, though, how to accommodate their tastes. For the purposes of this exercise, I won't be doing that. Instead I'll focus on the extremes of my collection, the really weird stuff, the things I'm sure that half the class at least will loathe (and one or two will love).

I'll explain to them that I truly love every song I'm playing for them. I'll tell them how I've spent about ten years now broadening my tastes such that I can genuinely enjoy such disparate sounds. And then I'll ask them, if you did like this, why would you like it? Why would anyone?

From there, of course, it's hard to say precisely what will happen. One of the really great things about teaching is that the students will surprise you, that they will not do what you wanted them to do, and that you will (if you are alive to them, if you are listening) give them better learning for it. And you learn. Then it's not a lecture, it's a class. Anyway, the idea toward which I will generally steer things is this: that if you liked Titus Andronicus, it would be in part because they were angry and loud. And if you liked Stars, it would be in part because they were quiet and sometimes sad, sometimes happy. If you liked Sunset Rubdown, it would be in part for the complexity. If you liked The Tallest Man on Earth, it would be in part for the simplicity. If you liked Stars Like Fleas, it would be the nervous energy. If you liked Bon Iver, it would be for the calm. If you liked Shit and Shine, it would be for the harsh noise. If you liked Tim Hecker, it would be the sweet fuzz. And so on.

The hope being that they will quickly catch on and take over, telling me why a person would like this song or that one I play for them, if they did like it. I will write some words down. It should become clear very quickly that one can and should like opposites -- that we love each band or musician not for their perfect implementation of The Elements of Music (rhythm, melody, harmony, voice, timbre, whatever) but for their pursuit of their own sound, feeling, vice. And that you can afford, if you're not a musician, to focus on a narrow subset of music, a certain zone of feeling and noise. But if you were a musician, or if you considered yourself a true devotee of music, you would have to broaden your tastes and learn how to love so many things.

The lesson here is not objectivity but exuberance. It is the joy of learning and knowing things not yourself.

From here I plan to segue to a discussion of the pleasures of reading. I'll ask them, what are some things that feel good when we read? Someone might say "character." Someone else might say "beauty." Someone else might say "happy endings." Someone else might say "funny jokes." And so on. I'll write down the things they say on the board. I may categorize the pleasures they name. I may broaden or refine them. I'll suggest some of my favorites too. We may discuss examples. I will name opposites. We will spend as much of the class naming pleasures as we can.

There are a few goals here. One is to give my students permission to write what they want to write. Another is to prepare them to read, from our outside writers as well as our class, a wide range of material. Another is to help them begin to see the potential for more complicated pleasures than happy or sad stories. Another is to allow the students a sort of agenda-setting power: in naming the pleasures they know and love, they will prepare us for their own work. The next day I'll bring in a list of everything we talked about (with perhaps some additions), and this way we'll have a sort of shared vocabulary, and a reminder of the many ways to read, and love.

Another goal is buy-in. When you let students name and define things themselves, they better understand and retain what they've named.

But again, it comes back to exuberance, which is in many ways the main thing I want to teach in this class. I don't think the goal of an intro CW course should be teaching the right way of doing things. I don't even think it should be "craft." I think my job at the outset is to bring them to life to the spark of art, to help them see the beauty in minimalism and the beauty in excess. To make them more like musicians, who make a sound they like first and ask why later, and less like city planners. There are probably more and less successful strategies for writing. But there is also writing itself. The emphasis of writing programs should more often be, I think, on the latter.

More on this soon.

On the pleasures of reading, pt. 1

I wrote and "presented" a paper about this at the AWP pedagogy forum in Denver this year, but I'll give you the cleaner, sweeter, less academic version:

Basically, we are failing our students.

In teaching creative writing we tend to break down our chosen genre into a few basic elements. In fiction the canonical list goes something like this, and in this order: character, conflict, structure, setting, point of view, theme, and plot. Character refers to the people in the story and nothing else. Conflict refers to what they want and what's in their way. Structure can refer to several things, but typically we mean a three-part shape of rising and then falling action roughly corresponding to a beginning, middle, and end. (How much, when, and to what extent the action can rise and fall varies considerably according to who you ask.) Setting is where and when (but not how) the story takes place -- ideally a real location several years or decades (but probably not centuries) past. Point of view refers to the following options: close third past person tense, distant third person past tense, first person past tense, close third person present tense, or first person present tense, in that order of preference. Theme refers to the system of meaning and values that underlies the text, with a preference toward stories subtly structured to restrict readings toward certain ends considered productive. Plot is what happens.

Perhaps we also list "language," which refers to the selection of phrasing and words.

This list is reasonable and even useful in and of itself, but the attitudes that frequently attend its use are unhelpful. While we generally agree that different stories will emphasize different elements depending on their needs and the strengths of the writer, this list of elements is understood as being on some level a check list. A story either has "character," for instance, or it does not have "character," according to certain common but usually unspoken standards and definitions. Character is achieved by careful, tasteful use of heteroglossia within the narration; by careful, tasteful use of dialogue; by direct description of the character's thoughts and feelings; by indirect revelation through present and past action; and by direct revelation through narration ("Johnny was a real tough guy").

Likewise, setting would seem to imply the possibility of settings in time and space rather more diverse than "somewhere the author has lived or visited as it is commonly understood to have existed within the past hundred years" but generally this is understood as the only valid version of setting. Structure is understood largely in terms of 1) section breaks, 2) major events, and 3) perhaps most importantly, the arc of intensity (emotional, thematic, etc.) within the story. It almost never refers to the use and structure of language. Plot is often viewed derisively; the less said on "theme," the better.

Again, this list of elements is not necessarily unhelpful, but the restricting mindset that comes with it is deeply harmful. It limits student potential, alienates writers, oversimplifies the complex and interrelated decisions faced by writers, and leaves students needlessly under-informed about the possibilities of their work. The result is a more homogeneous, less interesting body of literature.

First, we should understand that while most stories will have most of these elements, some will not. The cult of character in fiction, for instance, is troubling to me. Yes, I love character. Yes, I think most people will have good results if they emphasize it. No, I do not think that emphasizing character above all else is a universal solution, nor do I always want to read stories about character. The same goes for all of these other elements, apart from language -- one can rarely write a story without language. (Plot is similar in that it's difficult to write a story in which "nothing happens" -- if nothing else, the text itself happens, and often this seems to be the plot.)

The first question we should ask, then, is not then whether these elements exist in a text, or even whether they are strong in the text. The most useful question to begin with is how they are present in the text. How are the characters characters? How does the setting operate both in terms of time and space, and style or mindset? How does the logic of the story operate in terms of structure, plot, and language? (Viewed from this perspective I find it difficult to separate these three elements, though others will experience them differently.) How does the language language?

Though both are canonical writers, Flannery O'Connor's stories happen not only in a different time and place from those of Joyce, but in different universes with their own logics, their own rules, their own styles of character, their own language. A Flannery O'Connor story couldn't happen in Dubliners for more reasons than the most obvious. Though I think we instinctively understand this, we often reduce it to a question of style or perspective, while ignoring the clear implication that if two writers operating in ostensibly realist modes can be so different, there must be logics and universes of story that would strike us as entirely alien, though they have their own powerful coherence (or powerful incoherence).

Once we've considered how a story operates, it becomes more reasonable to ask ourselves how well it achieves those operations. However, it is easy here to return to the sort of thinking that got us into trouble in the first place -- are the characters "deep"? Is the setting "convincing"? Does the plot "make sense"? These are often the right questions but not always, because they don't make reference to how the story aims to work. We have to ask ourselves that first, and then adjust our terms on that basis. A story may not want to have deep characters or a convincing setting. If it doesn't, it can still be pleasurable to read.

A more flexible way to look at the work in question would be, then, to consider what pleasures are present in the text (how is it pleasurable to read the text in its current incarnation), what pleasures are potential in the text (how might the text be altered to create more pleasure based on its current hows and whys), and what other possibilities present themselves after careful reading. This is, at its heart, another way of trying to do what we almost always say we mean to do, which is to focus on letting the story become what it wants to be rather than what we as individual readers want it to be. But ultimately I think it works better, for reasons I'll explain and illustrate in future posts.

First One Ever!

I was just typing up some notes from an academic advising session with a student and instead of typing “testing asap” I typed “testing asp.” A testing asp! I thought. What a great idea. What would it do? Slither through the legs of chairs and sink teeth into students attempting to cheat? Then I thought, maybe a testing asp is a little too Harry Potter.

I’ve never read Harry Potter but I had a friend in grad school who did. She worked a summer at a store that was like Barnes & Nobel but smaller and more regional and brighter inside and which sold some stuffed animals and a lot of used books and albums in addition to new copies. When the last Harry Potter book came out this friend was behind a register in the bookstore and selling a copy to someone and the someone behind that someone straight spoiled the ending! No matter how you feel about Harry Potter, you can probably agree that spoiling the ending of anything for a fervent fan is just a dick move.

The bookstore has since closed down, which doesn’t affect me now directly because I no longer live in my grad school town, but which does affect the parts of my brain that look happily back on my time spent in the store, visiting my friend during the long summer in which I didn’t work and really did little other than fly around town on a $70 bicycle and watch movies until dawn and shave my head after a bad amateur haircut and sometimes climb rock walls.

Have you ever climbed a rock wall? They’re colorful constructs, tall planks of wood with handholds bolted in, some fat and proboscis-like and others small and shaped like partially eaten pizza slices. Usually certain trails will be marked by colored strips of tape or paint or sometimes by certain stickers so that you have an easier time making it to the ceiling if you go up the barnyard animals trail than if you go up the UFOs trail. Usually you’ll have to have someone hold the other end of a rope that connects to your waist but sometimes you’ll have a machine in the ceiling hold that other end of the rope and if so once you reach the top you can just let go and fall a little and then fall more slowly toward the people staring up at you from the ground.

I’m writing a novella right now and there is some rock climbing in it. It’s my first one ever (I considered capping and bolding ever there), and it’s a pretty great time. I wrote a while back about considering a novella, a form I’d always shunned, and then I started researching other writers’ suggestions for novellas, and reading some of them, and reading advice about them . . . well, all this is to say that I decided the shortish-long form could be interesting for the quirks and possibilities unique to it. And I was right! The project is going pretty well as I approach the end and the story feels like one that could have been stretched to 80,000 words but only with a lot of filler, and like one that could have been sliced down to 3500 words but only with a great loss of blood. And of the novellas I’ve read or read about, almost all of them read like/sound like they carry the same measure of weight.

I went to an independent film slam this weekend. It was my first one ever. (EVER!) It was hosted by an independent theater that sells delicious if expensive food and drinks and seats you in comfortable chairs. The entries in this independent film slam were short, between three and 22 minutes, amateur productions, and they were . . . well, some of them were strong and seemed matched to their length and ambition, and some felt a little hollow of story. I went away and ate some nachos thinking about all the story that needs to be crammed into a short space to make a film or a novel or whatever work, and about all the extra effort that filmmakers have to put into a story, compared with writers: securing equipment, locations, actors, then shooting, then editing. And what do you do with a short film? It must be even harder to place than a short story, and harder to put together successfully. It’s challenge enough to put an entire story together, and it must be almost impossible when the story itself is only one of your concerns.

MFA Time

Tomorrow we'll have the departmental welcome/welcome back lunch at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM. We'll probably eat sandwiches or bland Indian food or middling Mexican. They will buy too many Cokes, which will be fine by me because I Can Always Drink More Cokes. Maybe someone will make a speech (I don't remember; I don't think so). If they do we will clap, though we are not glad. If they don't we will not clap though we are glad. School will begin Thursday. Thursday morning I will teach creative writing for the first time. Thursday afternoon I will have contemporary American poetry, which will fulfill my lit requirements for my time here. (Read: I will never take another lit class.)

I have occasional urges to post something about the MFA experience as I've felt it, and MFA culture as I know it, but it strikes me as ultimately too inside-baseball. And I wouldn't know what to say. There are probably better ways to learn about writing, but they don't have university funding and you wouldn't get to teach. Whatever I feel about MFAing I do love teaching. Writers, as much as anyone, have trouble remembering to be excellent to one another. Writers believe they are sensitive and observant. Writers are, in my experience, often tricked out in leather skin and a thousand yards of dead nerves. Writers like to talk about community. In my experience, writers often believe (mistakenly) that being generous to each other will take too much of their time and energy. But kindness replenishes. Uncanny Valley costs me money and time. Uncanny Valley replenishes me. I am grateful to edit this will-be magazine. I am grateful to be a friend to other writers, and when they (you) are friends to me.

Killer combos

A while ago working on Fat Man and Little Boy I figured out a sweet move for writers: when you're stuck in a paragraph and you're not sure what to do, hit enter a few times until you feel like you're in a new place. Then start typing interesting words for later in the story. It can be a bit of description, some dialog, or anything really. This helps me beat "writer's block," which is pretty much a fake idea. It also helps me think about my stories from new angles. If Fat Man is going to be saying X at some point in the future, what does that reveal about him now? What will the other characters think when he says it, and how does that illuminate their state of mind in this section? One of the problems of linear character development, from a writing perspective, is that you usually start out with a guy in a place and then it takes you the rest of the book to figure out who he was in that first scene or two. This is the reader's journey too, so you don't want to excise it completely, but one of my big problems is that this road tends to need a lot of smoothing in revision. Forcing myself to think about character in this way seemed to help me figure things out more quickly, which enriched my first drafts and made revision easier.

This won't work for everybody, but it's been doing wonders for me since I started it. My last short story was written in an extremely non-linear, roving sort of way. Whenever I got stuck in one scene, I would just start working on another. During the best times I was actually buzzing with what felt like too much energy, too many ideas, bouncing all over the place. It was pretty great. The one I'm working on tonight is shaping up the same way.

Another thing I've done tonight that I've read about but haven't tried so often is I just sort of ground my head against what felt like a sort of middling story hoping I would get something out of it in a flash. (It had some fun sentences but I had trouble imagining where it could go that would be worthwhile.) Then I wrote this one sentence that felt better than all the rest. After a few more minutes of screwing around I opened a new window, retyped that sentence, then changed it, then, suddenly, had what felt like a good beginning. It was a sweet move.

A few years ago I gave a speech/presentation to a bunch of students and professors about the graphic novel I'd spent the summer writing. I took three or four hours laboring over the presentation, which was about two pages of single-spaced text. I sent it to my instructor. I read it out loud for practice. Then we did presentations. I was so bored and annoyed with the guy who went before me, who had apparently spent his entire summer preparing to copy and paste Wikipedia pages into a Powerpoint document at the last second, that I crumpled my speech up and threw it in the garbage as I walked up to the podium. (Maybe a bratty move.) Then I spoke off the top of my head. My instructor, who wasn't there, said he knew the speech had gone well because I crumpled up what I had written. That meant to him I was on top of things. There are moments when I'm writing that feel the same way. I know I'm doing something right because I change the manner in which I'm doing it.

Do you have those moments? Something like them?